


But It Should Have Been Right

by superfluouskeys



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, NSFW, One Night Stands, Solavellan, here is this thing, i'm in an "ill-advised hookup" kind of mood s o, just a little nsfw angsty fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-12
Updated: 2017-02-12
Packaged: 2018-09-23 18:10:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9670217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superfluouskeys/pseuds/superfluouskeys
Summary: "All things in life are cyclical," Solas says to her.  "Sometimes one spends a stretch of time gathering information, other times a stretch of time processing it."In the early days at Haven, Lady Lavellan finds herself with a great deal of information to process, and no idea how to begin.  For better or worse, existential stress has a way of leading her into decisions one might describe as rash.





	

It's beyond strange that she finds herself attracted to him at all.  She's never had more than a passing interest in anyone up until now—saw her clanmates more as siblings than as potential lovers, and saw outsiders almost unequivocally as enemies—and Solas is an odd-looking fellow to start with, not unpleasant to the eye, but certainly not conventionally handsome, and definitely at least twice her age.

Maybe it's the mixture of the familiar with the unfamiliar, she reasons.  He's an elf, but has next to nothing in common with the elves from her clan, and would that she never forget it.  Indeed, his open disdain for the Dalish in contrast with his general pleasantness and respect towards her never fails to be jarring, and she can't decide whether to enjoy it or mistrust it.  Much as she herself holds some disdain for her people, she can't decide whether Solas is too much of an outsider to judge them fairly.

Maybe it's the curious dichotomy of his self-presentation—the buttoned-up scholar in contrast to the ruthless precision of his unique brand of self-taught magic.  Watching him as he paces Haven and catching a glimpse of him on the battlefield is like seeing two completely separate people, and she wonders which one is more real.

Whatever sowed the seeds, it seems the feeling is here to stay—has taken root in the pit of her stomach and flares up at the most inopportune of times.  She flirts with him, clumsily and almost accidentally, and his responses lend themselves very much to buttoned-up scholar.  He seems flustered and surprised, and not entirely dismissive, and this reaction only fuels the fire of her bizarre infatuation.

One evening, unable to sleep and pacing the town in a vain attempt to clear her head, she sees the flicker of light from his little house on the far side of their encampment, and impulsively she raps upon the side of the window.

He doesn't start, exactly, but his shoulders tense ever so slightly before he looks up from one of a dozen books sprawled across his desk.  "My lady Herald," he greets her, subdued and breathless.

She leans on the window frame.  "You could call me by my name," she says pleasantly, but there's an edge to it, heightened by the fluttering of nervousness in her stomach.

He bows his head slightly.  "Elonaya," he says, and when his eyes meet hers again, her throat tightens unhelpfully. 

The cadence of her name brings out the unique lilt of his accent, so far removed from the Dalish or the city elves, something like how she imagines the ancient elves must have sounded.  She smiles.  "You're up late."

"And you are out late," he counters, standing, then hesitates.  "Would you...care to come in?"

"I'm already halfway there," she tries to joke, gesturing to the uncovered window in which she is leaning, but her attempt at levity sounds more skittish than anything.  "I'd have thought a scholar of the Fade wouldn't pull many all-nighters."

Solas chuckles charitably, either not noticing or deliberately ignoring her nerves, and lets her in.  "All things in life are cyclical," he responds.  "Sometimes one spends a stretch of time gathering information, other times a stretch of time processing it."

"So this is the processing stage, I take it."

"I expect you're experiencing a similar phase," he says.

He's hovering, hands clasped behind his back, studious, and she realizes he's waiting for her to take a seat.  Her options are his desk chair, his bed, or the floor.  In another moment of unprecedented impulsiveness, she sits on the edge of his bed.

"Not sure how to begin to process, perhaps," she says, fixing her gaze upon her feet hanging just slightly off the floor.  She can feel his eyes on her, but cannot even begin to contemplate looking up.

"Understandable," Solas replies.  He turns his desk chair to face the spot she's chosen and sits.  There's maybe a hand's width of space between their knees, and now it's the empty air that draws Elonaya's focus.  "All things considered, I...would venture to say you're adapting very well."

Elonaya licks her lips, dares a glance upward.  Solas's eyes are the kind of bright grey that reflects whatever is around them, and right now she can see the warm flicker of candlelight in the irises.  "Are you quite certain?" she wonders, with a small half-smile.  "I think I might have gone a bit mad already."

The light from his candles perfectly captures the sudden tightness in his jaw, and the way his eyes dart down and back up just for an instant, and she hears him swallow before he speaks.  "What do you mean?" he breathes.

She's definitely gone mad.  The stress has addled her brain, the sense that she might not live to see tomorrow has rendered her destructively reckless.  She's trembling, but she reaches out and rests her hand on his knee, averts her eyes so she cannot see his first reaction.  "If you're...terribly busy," she says, slowly, quietly, to cover up the tremor in her voice, and dares to slide her hand just a bit further up his leg, "...then I'll leave you to your studies." 

She pushes herself off the bed enough to rest a bit of weight on her toes and, since he seems to have frozen, ventures a glance at his face.  His lips are parted slightly, as though in awe, and the sight of it sends a wonderfully unhelpful jolt through her body.  All at once she's feeling delightfully bold and dreadfully vulnerable.  "Should I go?" she prompts him again, for she feels herself hovering upon the precipice of _something_ , and she cannot bear to live another second without an answer, one way or the other.

She feels his fingers brush her wrist.  "Stay," he says, and instead of rising, suddenly she is falling.  She falls from the bed onto her toes, from her toes onto his lap.  He catches her hips with his long-fingered hands and she catches herself with hands upon his shoulders.  Still they're but a breath apart, and from this distance she can hear that his breathing is just as ragged as hers.  They show their nerves in different ways, it seems—she through acts of somewhat precipitous daring, and he through tensing and freezing up altogether.

Her hand curls around the back of his neck, her fingers cold against his flushed skin, and he inhales sharply, but still does not move to close the distance between them.  Her eyes are half shut, and all she can see in the dim light are his lips, still ever so slightly parted.  A large part of her thinks she really ought to go.  She's tumbled into this moment so suddenly, with a person she knows only to be unusually difficult to read, and she imagines this can only end in disaster.

But after all, Elonaya is no goddess, no divine vessel of Andraste.  She is not immune to the sensation of a warm hardness pressing against her thigh, of trembling hands resting upon her hips, or of hot, shuddering breaths against her lips.  No, she is a mere mortal, and whatever madness has brought her here, to the very edge of reason, she cannot bear to drag herself away now.

She kisses Solas, and all at once whatever resolve that kept him still is utterly undone.  He drags her hips harder against his, then loops one arm about her waist so that he can run his fingers through her hair, cradles the back of her head and returns her kiss deeply, with a kind of ferocity she would never have expected, so surprising that it's overwhelming.

He stands, easily picks her up as he does, and lays her down onto his little bed, and now she is the one coming undone.  She runs her hands over the fine fuzz on the top of his head, thumbs the points of his ears, explores the hard line of his jaw as she kisses him again and again and again, hardly notices that between kisses he's managed to undo the clasps on her shirt until the cool air hits her bare flesh and she shivers deliciously, involuntarily arches her back so that her body is flush against his, and then repeats the motion quite intentionally.

His lips are on her neck now, and she sees stars exploding behind her eyelids.  She's only kissed a few people before, and it never felt anything like this, like sparks or explosions or unraveling.  Her fingernails dig into his shoulders, met only with sturdy cloth, and she fumbles with his tunic—far less adeptly than he has removed hers, but the result is the same.  Now when he leans down to capture her lips once more she feels the warmth of his bare chest against hers.  She moans softly into the kiss, and feels his grip on her waist tighten in response.

He draws back, somewhat abruptly, leaving a gust of cool air in his wake.  She opens her eyes to look up at him, little more than a silhouette in the candlelight, but there are a thousand unknowable things burning in his eyes.  He looks like he wants to say something, but stops with lips half-parted as before.  His brow furrows slightly, something between confusion and sadness, and he touches the side of her face that is more bare skin than Vallaslin.  "You are so beautiful," he murmurs.

She doesn't understand the conflicted expression upon his face, cannot begin to fathom it, and doesn't know how to respond to the words he has spoken.  She's never thought much about her physical appearance, never wished to be seen as beautiful, or as anything other than not-to-be-trifled-with.  Still, the utterance causes a curious fluttering in her heart, a flush that moves from her cheeks to the tips of her ears, and she smiles up at him.

"You think so?" she wonders lightly.

His eyes drag across the length of her body, explore at length what he has only ventured to glance upon previously, and he nods with a kind of solemnity that would be amusing if it weren't so obviously sincere.

"Then..." she traces her fingertips down the side of his neck, down his prominent breastbone, and brings them to rest just above the waistband of his trousers, "perhaps you ought to kiss me again."

One corner of his lip turns upward into a tiny smirk, and he shakes his head almost imperceptibly.  Then, without so much as a hitch or a hesitation, he has undone and removed her trousers and smallclothes—she hardly even has time to notice the faint tingle of his magic—and the next kiss he bestows upon her sends her reeling.  She shoves her fist against her mouth to hold in what might well have been a scream, and finds she must keep it there for the next several minutes, for every flick of his tongue seems to send her spiraling.

He curls one long finger inside of her, takes her clit between his lips and sucks lightly upon it, and she thinks she might be weeping.  She digs the fingernails of her free hand into his shoulder, which she has reason to believe only encourages him, and continues the battle to keep quiet.  Her climax is long and satisfying, but he does not relent until she's shaking all over, and positively whimpering.

She practically drags him back up on top of her, then sets about tugging impatiently at the band of his trousers.  Her hands are still trembling, but this time it's hardly nerves that have rendered her unnecessarily bold, but the heady rush and glorious denouement of her orgasm.  Solas obliges her silent request, and she looks up at him with bleary and heavy-lidded eyes.  He's got that same sad, befuddled look about him, expressive eyebrows all knitted up and eyes reflecting the flicker of candlelight like his mind is changing by the instant.

He's come to rest between her legs, completely naked as she is now, but he's in no hurry, and the anticipation brings that churning, nervous feeling back to the forefront of her consciousness.  He meets her eyes with a troubled smile, smoothes her hair away from her face and gazes down at her thoughtfully for a long moment, enters her with agonizing slowness and watches her reaction with a kind of rapt intensity that only serves to heighten her pleasure.

It's a new and overwhelming sensation—fullness, and being observed so intently—and she finds she's nearly beside herself once more in hardly any time at all.  She reaches for him, intends to pull him down into a kiss that will stifle her moans, but he catches her hands and pins them to the bed, turns his painstakingly slow movements into rhythmic thrusts, and never once looks away from her face.

A part of her wants to look away, or to close her eyes, but she cannot bring herself to do it.  She's mesmerized by the sight of Solas watching her as he fucks her, and even when she feels her whole body tensing and twisting and contorting with the sheer force of another building orgasm, she can scarcely even bring herself to blink, cannot bear to miss a moment of this.

This time she does scream—has no control of her hands to catch herself, and doubts she could have muffled the sound even if she did.  She throws her head back and wails, maybe cries _Solas_ or some meaningless string of Elven gods.  And she's so very undone after that first wave passes that she almost misses the way Solas's eyes squeeze closed, just for a second or two, as he nears his own climax.

He lets go of her hands and withdraws, and she shudders at the sensation.  Leftover ripples of pleasure are still washing over her, and as he lowers himself to lie beside her, he reaches down to rub little circles over her clit, sending a delightfully overwhelming little jolt through her with every rotation.  Sometime after he has relented, and moved instead to running his fingers through her hair, she drifts into a deep, dreamless slumber.

She doesn't realize how sleep-deprived she's been until she wakes in broad daylight, alone in Solas's bed, with the covers tucked snugly around her shoulders.

_All things in life are cyclical_ , he'd said.  _Sometimes gathering information, sometimes processing it._

Today it seems she has a fair bit more to add to her list of things she doesn't know how to process.


End file.
